To drum up buzz for its new Arts & Culture app, Google debuted a program that allows users to snap a selfie of themselves and search through databases of classic art to see if they have a lookalike hanging in a museum.

Because Google must continually test our faith in their omniscient benevolence, the app is not available in Canada for unspecified reasons. However, we fired up a VPN and fed a who’s who of recognizable Canadian faces into the system. These were the best results.

Celine Dion

Celine Dion’s lookalike is Irina Strueva, a woman depicted in a 2000 portrait held by the Institute of Russian Realist Art. It also means that, unlike every other name on this list, Dion’s classic art doppelgänger is likely still alive.

Justin Trudeau

Regrettable moustache or no, images of Justin Trudeau all end up being matched with this 1943 self-portrait of Soviet painter Viktor Ivanov. This was painted at the height of the Great Patriotic War, when much of Ivanov’s time was normally spent on Soviet propaganda posters.

Don Cherry

Hockey commentator Don Cherry is apparently a close match with this portrait of Philip II of Spain, the monarch best known for ruling Spain at the height of its global empire. While their resemblance may be disputed, the pair seem to share an affinity for flamboyant dress.

Margaret Atwood

Due to her grey curls, Google got confused and paired Margaret Atwood’s image with all kinds of Enlightenment-era portraits of men in powdered wigs. However, Madame Geoffrin here is her closest female lookalike. A prominent citizen of France just before the revolution, Geoffrin lived a somewhat Atwood-esque life, holding court at artsy salons and the like. This painting is also the only one on this list known to have been painted by a woman.

Justin Bieber

This is going to be very controversial for Elvis fans, but Google is absolutely certain that Justin Bieber is the modern reincarnation of The King. No matter what photo of the Canadian pop star is fed into the program, it is inevitably declared a match with this 1969 portrait of Presley. Interestingly, this is the only painted portrait that Elvis ever sat for.

Neil Young

Neil Young is notable as one of the only modern public figures to wear mutton chops. It may be why Google paired him with this unnamed figure from an 1857 British painting entitled Waiting for Legal Advice. The image depicts a kind of humourous Norman Rockwell-esque scene of a stubborn and difficult client waiting in his lawyer’s office.

Mike Duffy

Four centuries divide Senator Mike Duffy from Nicolaas Schmelzing, a prominent citizen of 17th century Netherlands. And yet, they are united through time by their baldness, portliness and desire for acclaim.

Sir John A. Macdonald

Appreciate for a moment the sheer coincidence of this match. Google had thousands of sketches and paintings to sift through in search of one that looked like Sir John A. Macdonald, and yet their algorithms ultimately decided that the founder of Canada most closely resembled the founder of the United States, George Washington. According to Google, these two images are an 80 per cent match.

P.K. Subban

One notable problem crops up pretty quickly with the “Is your portrait in a museum?” app: There aren’t a lot of oil paintings of non-white people. Particularly when people with African heritage are loaded into the system, Google is left to desperately spin its wheels in search of any scrap of art that looks remotely African. For famed Ontario-born defenceman P.K. Subban, the best it could do was this ivory mask depicting the mother of Oba Esigie, a king of the powerful West African state of Benin.

Louis Riel

It may only be the choice of facial hair that forms a resemblance between Metis revolutionary Louis Riel and this 19th century American sketch of a musician. The sketch is by James McNeill Whistler, the painter best known for the portrait Whistler’s Mother.

Robbie Robertson

Songwriter and The Band frontman Robbie Robertson has both Jewish and Indigenous heritage, making it unlikely that there all that many people in Renaissance Denmark and Belgium who looked like him. This portrait of an unknown man appears to be an notable exception. “As a type he is timeless, and we recognise him as a strong and forceful personality for whom the end justifies the means,” reads an official description of the proto-Robertson.

James Cameron

Wildly successful film director James Cameron was matched with this 17th century Spanish painting of St. Peter in tears. A popular artistic subject for the time, it shows Peter repenting for his denial of Christ. As of press time, James Cameron is not known to have ever repented for anything.

Graham Greene

Graham Greene is best known for his roles in Dances With Wolves and The Green Mile, and he can currently be seen in the Aaron Sorkin-directed drama Molly’s Game. Louis Philippe, the Duke of Orleans was a French nobleman who supported the French Revolution and got himself guillotined anyway. If the Duke’s name sounds familiar, it’s because his son briefly served as king in a restored French monarchy.

Wayne Gretzky

This is easily the most spitting image on this list. The Great One shares the eyes, nose and even shaving habits of this portrait of Saint Dionysius the Areopagite. Although he is usually depicted with a beard, Dionysius was a citizen of Athens who became one of the first converts to Christianity after catching sermons by St. Paul. Since the Greek saint had already been dead for almost 1,500 years by the time this was painted, the Gretzky doppelganger is more likely to have been an unnamed artist’s model.

Children’s performer Fred Penner has enjoyed a career resurgence of late, and he has celebrated by growing a biblical white beard. As with James Cameron above, this was enough for Google to also pair him with a portrait of a penitent St. Peter.

Will it be a hot war with protest and acrimony, like Uber vs. taxis? Or is the outcome inevitably foretold, no matter what, as in Netflix vs. Blockbuster?

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